This is kind of complicated, but I'll do my best. It's happened to me tons of times and this is going to be sort of a ramble but bear with me! Happens a lot attacking pirate stations, at least 4 times over the last two days.

I have a ship, it loots some stuff (good stuff!). It takes enough damage and "grays out." I assume it loses all its crew, or some other horrible thing and starts drifting away, even though it's repairing itself.... but it has my stuff!

I chase after it to blow it up and get my stuff. It usually blows up in mines or drifts off the map, but some times I blow it up, regardless, my stuff is never there. Some times it's right back in my inventory when I exit the map. On more than one occasion I've exited the map only to have my entire fleet regenerated with loot retrieved. Other times I've only had the one ship I was able to flee with. If my entire fleet is destroyed I lose everything.

This is maximally distressing when I was there with cooperative partners and we take down the station together and I lose my ships and they are able to kite. They seem to get all the loot, while I get absolutely nothing. Worse yet, once the final boss ships are destroyed I can't reenter, while they are able to stay in the instance, which makes no sense. So I have no opportunity to pick up my loot.

It would probably take a design change to leave a little loot box floating in space for me to pick up or something, or people might not like that balance, but holy cow me and a guy took down 4 bosses and I got squat when he started kiting the pirates when my last ship got destroyed. I'm not saying he did that intentionally but ........

Now you're wondering where I'm going with this, it's easily avoided by simply exiting the map with one ship at the very beginning but this has got to be some kind of defect or exploit and I only do it with ships after they've looted things, because I'm tired of my ships being blown up or "grayed out" and then the loot seeming to be lost. I still lose the ships some times due to mines but I don't know what else to do, so I try to get ships with loot safely out and that seems like the least or non-exploity thing to do where I can actually keep the loot I earned.

Otherwise I just get spawn camped by pirates until I die anyway (lost an hour of loot that I gathered while exploring), which also happened last night since at a certain point it's literally impossible to get away from them as they infinitely spawn camp you, which is a post for another day.

Hello starpally and thank you for the feedback!
About re-entering instance after you destroyed Pirate Mothership - it's still a thing to discuss. There is a slight chance that we will add ability to re-enter it if there are other players still there.

Thanks for listening / reading through all of that feedback. I know it was muddy.

First pirate station of the day though and had two ships in a row gray out in the mine fields pretty much immediately and my loot disappeared. I know you appreciate the feedback, etc. but is that supposed to happen? What exactly is happening there? Am I doing something wrong? Not only did I lose two ships, but I tried to zone out with my remaining ship, it won't let me leave, it says the ship is "out of bounds" and the two ships that grayed out and drifted away (one I destroyed, no loot) now say "deployed" instead of "inoperative" like my ships that were actually destroyed... and I'm completely locked in and can't do anything. I had to completely X out of the game, and when I came back in, the two grayed out ships were miraculously fine again but loot gone. Only got a few things but still... It's damn hard in the pirate stations and even if I get a few things I'm happy, and my ships gray out and I lose it all and it's very frustrating.

In regards to returning to the pirate stations after they're cleared, to be honest, I just want a way to reclaim some of the loot. The guy, probably not vindictively, kited the pirates (it was an insanely fierce battle), and ended up with all of the loot, while I got booted and unable to re-enter.

I don't *need* to re-enter. But if there could be a little loot crate maybe on the map chart or something for me to just drive over or something where I could get half, or something if it despawns.... Not trying to ask for anything super insane... even if it was 1/3rd... or 1/4th... or... like 2 items... :(

Seriously if it's easier for you guys, do it the easiest way possible, but man we co-op took down like 4 bosses in an insane battle royale and I got zero.

If your ship greyed out it means it runned out of crew, it happens fast if you take too many strong explosive blast from mine, and the crew DOES NOT regenerate over time, ill give you a few tips to get passed mine fields easily

Option 1 - Outfit a super fast scout frigate <no items just put a better engine be it turn or speed> make it rush mine extremities and move out quickly, if fast enough it will detonate without harming anyone.

Option 2 - use plasma web mod, if you shoot right on top of the mine it will make it explose, but CD is 30sec so it can be long.

Option 3 - Create a super resilient Dreadnough with over 12k armor, and a repair drone, you can just rush to loot and repair yourself with minimal loss of crew if you dont triger more that 5-6 mines

Option 4 - Outfit a Battleship or Dreadnought with 6k+ armor with a warp mod and warp directly on top of loot, you will have to wait CD to get out, but you generally trigger minimum amount of mines doing so.

my recommendation is to use a high engineering dreadnought <Atlantes UKLG or BN are best> outfit them with minimal weapon system, say just fit missiles cause its 360 degree targeting on BN or just 1 cannon per side on the UKLG the ship will be super slow and its purpose will be to tank not dish out dps so its doesnt matter.

i recommend the warp version because the ship will be extremely slow, the warp enables you to retreat and save the ship if it gets into a bad spot, now you can just ram your way to the loot and repair your self on the go, the mines are for bosses.

10 mines = 12k damage, which is enough to annihilate <or close enough> any pirate leader. you can just send a scout to find its location put most fleet at safe distance, warp your dreadnought in, spam mine on the boss while your fleet comes closer to finish him if he is not dead yet.

done... you killed a boss<or pirate station> in less than 10 seconds. now you just need to wait 2min CD to get back all the mines and do the same to the next boss.

easy right? lol

with that strategy you can easily finish the whole pirate base + all boss + all loot, it takes about 30min, because your dreadnought is still super slow if you dont have the warp <if you only have 1 Dread>

If you have better fleet formation, like the one that gives 3 dreadnoughts, you can fit a FLEET JUMP and remove 3 mines.

put the 3 dreadnought in close formation, and you can do 3 jumps in a row, have 3 heals, and... 21 mines. the jumps have only 1min CD so your fleet suddenly become the fastest thing possible. with the biggest burst possible

they are so tanky that nothing can kill them fast enough, you can just put 3 repair drones on the dreadnought that is being targeted, repairing him faster than damage he would take,

Regardless though, and I'm trying to be super clear about this. Something is going wrong with these events. This is at least the second time now where I can't even leave the pirate station, where it's saying a ship is out of bounds, and a ship is inoperative, etc.. I'm assuming because a ship got taken over by an enemy ship boarding crew this time. I have to completely shut the client off and restart it, and it's going to kick me all the way back.

I know there's ways I could be handling the instance better, and doing all kinds of super cool wizbang tactics to cheese these bosses to get cool loot, but it's still not technically working properly either. I'm trying to find the standard way of beating them first, and it's clearly not working. Granted I probably need point defense drones or whatever counters boarding crews, but once they capture my ships, even if some of my ships escape (or get grayed out from losing all of my crew from mines) I'm stuck here and have to completely reboot my client which means closing it out from Windows and logging back in again.

So this time I exited out and came back in, another one of my Faust some how survived which had died before and I ended up actually salvaging a ton of loot. The last time this happened I made it out with nothing.

Something is really wrong here, and I know this's somewhat of a muddy post, but I hope you can try to understand what I'm trying to say here. It's very inconsistent.

Starpally Said,
Regardless though, and I'm trying to be super clear about this. Something is going wrong with these events. This is at least the second time now where I can't even leave the pirate station, where it's saying a ship is out of bounds, and a ship is inoperative, etc.. I'm assuming because a ship got taken over by an enemy ship boarding crew this time. I have to completely shut the client off and restart it, and it's going to kick me all the way back.

I know there's ways I could be handling the instance better, and doing all kinds of super cool wizbang tactics to cheese these bosses to get cool loot, but it's still not technically working properly either. I'm trying to find the standard way of beating them first, and it's clearly not working. Granted I probably need point defense drones or whatever counters boarding crews, but once they capture my ships, even if some of my ships escape (or get grayed out from losing all of my crew from mines) I'm stuck here and have to completely reboot my client which means closing it out from Windows and logging back in again.

So this time I exited out and came back in, another one of my Faust some how survived which had died before and I ended up actually salvaging a ton of loot. The last time this happened I made it out with nothing.

Something is really wrong here, and I know this's somewhat of a muddy post, but I hope you can try to understand what I'm trying to say here. It's very inconsistent.

also when the ships die in space , sometimes the loot is in them , sometimes not ,
i have lost manycolony starters in space to pirates , recovered a few too (from my dead ship)

the fix is coming later :)

if you get stuck i found a few ways out
-you can go to main menu it with the button on the right side of screen in the battle
-you can open the console and 'exit' command and reload;takes a while
-hard close Alt+f4 then reload ;takes a while too
-console command 'restartlevel' to refresh the client and que the defeated screen OR it pushes you to main menu so you can resume the discovery session outside the pirate station if you have any ships left .